[Osmf-talk] Tile Usage Policy, serving the public and utilising our resources

[grin]

Hello everypeople,

I was pondering where in this thread shall I respond, since my thoughts are not direct deduction of what the Steves said.

Steve Coast wrote:

> TL;DR; OSM ships approaching a billion tiles a day and OSM is only 10-20% of the traffic.

And I wholeheartedly agree with what steveaOSM responded:

> I ponder the "80/20 stats, as stated" and think to myself "that's a fair return."  Those "users" (80%) greatly benefit, yes, though so does OSM as the shining beacon of "taking only 20%" to do so (provide said tiles).  There are a great many ways I (and I believe others) look at that and say "winning."  Those 80% make OSM a resounding success, even prove that we are one.  As "they" win, so does our project.  This is a fully operating feedback loop.

I believe the "philosophical" question is what is the purpose of the OSMF tileserver? 
Does it exist only to serve the osm mappers' everyday work?
Or does it serve OSM rendered tiles to the masses? With or without prior judgement, depending on the purpose or not?

Also there is the "technical" question: how do we utilise our resources?
What amount of reserources (which in the end equal donation money) do we use for what purpose?
How can we reduce or optimise resource usage? 
If we cannot, how can we equalise the money required to compensate some unequally pressed resource?


I think the first question is amply answered by Tile Usage Policy (https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/) which basically say that the purpose of the tileserver is that it serves both the OSM community AND the general public. Also that's what I believe in: the purpose is clear, it is a public service. We suggest that users shall encourage contributions, and require to follow the legal requirements. Basically that's about it.


Now, the further details on the page are about the second topic, namely, what resources do we have, how do we use them, and how do we restrict the technical details, and the reasons are also technical: we have limited resources and we clearly tell that in order to be able to serve the long tail (aka. the millions of small-time users) we require heavy users to either discuss it with us or serve their own tiles. I think the requirements are clear, understandable and pretty well matching our problem space.

I do not know the background since I am not in the DWG, but I believe the process should be that when we notice heavy users who were _not_ accepted by the DWG then we act on it, without any real drama, since this seems to be rather common. I believe if I were in the position of the DWG I would identify heavy users, and I would start a *friendly* and *positive* *discussion*. (If anyone feels that I should put my money where my mouth is, pray tell me, and I will consider joining the thankless DWG team and look at it from inside, which I really-really would like to avoid.)

What I think being "friendly, positive, discussion"?

First, I would try to figure out what they do, why do they need to use our servers. Maybe it's even justified, they may serve the masses, they may serve greater good, public purposes, I don't know, there are many cases which I'd consider OK (in my non-existing DWG hat). They would get permission, and problem solved.

If it is not, they they probably need help. I mean, running a tileserver nowadays is both simple and pretty cheap, and a real heavy user probably already possess the (monetary) resources to do it, but maybe they lack IT know-how. In my experience a lot of them do, and with help they can level up easily. I would really prefer helping them pulling up a server (as a community service or even as a paid consultancy work); or I could help them to find various OSM service providers since there are aplenty (https://switch2osm.org/providers/).

If they are not public serving and they are not accept neither doing their own nor to use a serving company then DWG clearly have the means to limit their usage or stop them, but only in case when they _really_ use up _technical_ resources. I definitely mean that it is not enough that I see "hey they shamelessly use our free service a lot, even if their resource usage is otherwise negligible", there shall be real "harm" ("heavy use") to present to get them restricted (and even then, in some cases, it was just a question of optimizing their local caching). We should be nice and really offer them upgrade paths, and only hit with the cluebat when they refuse to cooperate. (And I understand that the issue has some political overtones, but we really should try to stay neutral as much as we can [or want].)


In my Wikipedia hat I really should get me some OSM Ops and look at the details that serving tiles (especially vector tiles) require exactly what kind of resources in what amounts, and if it is feasible to serve to the general public then get WMF to sponsor a public server (yet again). This is almost absolutely not connected to this discussion but I strongly believe that we (as the OSM community) do need public servers to be usable by the (non-heavy but very numerous) users. 

Apart from that my europe vector tiles seem to be ready today (thanks to planetiler) and I'll throw them into the 'net soon and watch the resource usage. That's what I can do, technically, from my side.

And we do have great resources to help users to pull up their own servers, maybe they just need help to find them, or to find the providers mentioned. Let's not see malevolence where it can be adequately explained by... lack of knowledge. ;-)

g